Apache Closes Down Vulnerabilities

No less than five vulnerabilities were eradicated by the release of a new version of the Apache Web server.

Release 2.2.6 removes five partly critical security holes. Four of them are also closed by the latest 2.0 branch release, version 2.0.61. According to the Apache Foundation's release notes, vulnerabilities were removed in the "mod_proxy" and "mod_cache" modules. Attackers had previously been able to crash servers by targeted requests leading to a Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack.

A cross site scripting bug discovered by Stefan Esser – the initiator of the "Month of PHP Bugs" – is also a thing of the past. The fourth bug that affected both versions resulted in a DoS vulnerability in the Prefork-MPM module. The bug in the "mod_mem_cache" module only occurs in the 2.2 series. The vulnerability gave attackers the ability to read headers from prior connections in some circumstances.

The developers advise server administrators to switch to one of the new versions as soon as possible. The versions are available, as always, from the project's mirror servers. Besides fixing various vulnerabilities, the patches also include a number of bugfixes.